To our readers:

Posted: Friday, May 10, 2002

Some members of the community have received e-mail messages that appear to be from Empire staffers and that contain questionable or offensive material. Rest assured these e-mails do not originate here.

A virus in someone's computer outside the Empire is forging our return addresses and sending e-mails that look like they came from us.

Most of these bogus e-mails are easily spotted by the message title, which doesn't look like anything a family newspaper would communicate over the Internet. Others are harder to spot.

We do communicate with many people via e-mail, so legitimate messages are being sent. Please be careful opening any e-mail message, and, if in doubt, call the sender to see if it's real. Delete any suspect messages.